


Twilight House

by muse_in_absentia



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Afterlife, Blood, Breaking Up & Making Up, Camping, Death, Getting lost in the woods, M/M, Snow, Supernatural Elements, Wolves, off screen cult
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-22 12:30:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22716106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muse_in_absentia/pseuds/muse_in_absentia
Summary: The Twilight House is a myth.  Unfortunately for Sirius, sometimes the myth is stronger than reality.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 14
Kudos: 37
Collections: RS Fireside Tales Vol.2





	Twilight House

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you immensely to [TheHufflebean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SevralShips/pseuds/TheHufflebean) and [bshiat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bshiat/pseuds/bshiat) for the amazing beta work. This wouldn't have been the same without you guys!!!
> 
> Prompt below:  
> 

_The Twilight House is a myth. A liminal space between the worlds, unreachable for the living, unknowable for the dead. It is the sort of myth one tells of around a campfire, when the only chills are those that come from the tales told. A parable spoken of in the depths of winter, when the snowfall muffles the life of the day, and leaves only the hearth and spirits to tend to the warmth within, the cold manufactured to replicate what can’t be allowed inside, but remaining enticing in ways impossible to ignore. But to tell the story of the Twilight House is to invite it in._

*

The sound of breathing slowing down was loud in the thin nylon tent, bouncing off the walls in a sort of flimsy echo chamber. Sweat was cooling on his chest, and it was far too cold, enveloping his body in a bubble of cooling air. The effect left him shivering in spite of the way Remus was curled up, tucked under his chin, his also sweaty skin sticking to Sirius in a way that he sort of liked, but would never have owned up to. 

“Maybe we should at least find our bedding,” Sirius suggested, not making any effort to move. 

“It’s right there,” Remus pointed at the pile of tangled up sleeping bags and blanket rolls wadded up near their feet. 

Sirius whacked Remus’ shoulder before he tried to toe the pile closer so he could cover them against the creeping cold. 

“Why did I agree to this camping trip in bloody March?” he grumbled, finally giving up and dislodging Remus so he could reach the bedding. 

“Because I asked?” Remus shrugged, sitting up and running his fingers through the tangles of hair that were flopping over his eyes, making Sirius momentarily forget what he was doing. 

“Yeah, that might have done it,” Sirius said, finally succeeding in disentangling a sleeping bag and draping it around his shoulders like a down-filled cape. The wind outside of their tent was making the small remaining campfire flames flicker, shadows skittering across the walls of the tent like a distorted story projector. “Okay, let me try again. Why did you ask to go in March instead of waiting for a reasonable season where we wouldn’t freeze to death just because we decided to get naked?” 

The way Remus looked away from him, shoulders drawing up, neck bowing slightly, made Sirius almost regret asking. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been enjoying their trip all week despite the weather. No one else on the trails, no family obligations, no well-meaning friends distracting from their time together, no risk of other campers hearing their nightly activities. It was a respite that Sirius was enjoying, the solitude a welcome thing to be shared only with Remus who had earned the right to Sirius’ privacy. 

“You know what, never mind,” Sirius sighed, trying to sling an arm around Remus, but finding that he couldn’t quite bring himself to drop the sleeping bag from his shoulders for long enough. “March is perfectly fine for camping. At least it’s private.” 

A particularly strong gust of wind kicked up, shaking the walls of their tent and finally causing Remus to reach for the second sleeping bag, draping it over himself before sliding back against Sirius’ side. 

“When I was growing up we couldn’t afford vacations,” Remus said slowly, refusing to look at Sirius. 

Sirius wanted to touch him, shake him, something to make him understand that Sirius had never cared that Remus hadn’t grown up with money. That it was one of the things he loved about him. That the people he had known who _had_ grown up with money were, for the most part, insufferable gits and not the sort of people he wanted to associate with now that he was old enough to have the choice. However, he was afraid that if he broke Remus out of his reverie it would derail the entire conversation, so he just sat there and waited for Remus to continue, feeling the distance between them like a crevasse that he couldn’t traverse. It left him feeling even colder than the wind picking up outside. 

“Camping didn’t cost anything,” Remus continued, picking at the edge of a scab on his wrist, the remnants of a gouge he had picked up hiking the day before, when he had insisted that he could scale the small rock face they had found. “But my father could only get time off during the slow seasons, so we always packed extra bedding and just went for it. It was nice, being the only people out here, like it was our own private forest or something. I thought maybe you would like that.” 

The silence pressed down on them, an extra blanket that seeped inside the warmth they were trying to build, cooling it and scattering it away. 

“Remus?” 

“Hmm?” 

“Look at me?” 

It took a moment for Remus to break free of his self-imposed frozen state and drag his eyes up to meet Sirius’. 

As soon as Remus was looking at him Sirius ducked his head down to kiss him, a long lingering press of mouths with no real intent behind it other than to kiss and be close. When he pulled back, Sirius was smiling, despite the chill. “Have I seemed like I haven’t been enjoying myself?” 

“No,” Remus answered slowly, shaking his head, but his eyes didn’t clear up. “But you’re always so careful with me, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the difference. You’d never show it around me.” 

Sirius sighed. He’d thought he’d been much more subtle about that. 

“You noticed that, huh?” 

Strangely, that was the thing that got Remus to smile at him. “Sirius, you are a lot of wonderful things, but subtle really isn’t one of them.” 

“Hey, you take that back, I can absolutely do subtle! I’ve just never really felt the need to hide anything from you.” 

“You can do subtle, can you?” Remus smirked, one eyebrow going up and his shoulders relaxing. 

Sirius snorted and finally gave in, tucking Remus under his arm, and pulling the sleeping bags around them both. “Of course, I can. Just ask Regulus about our mother’s pearl earrings sometime, he’ll tell you I can do subtle.” 

“I’m not sure self-preservation is the same as subtle, but I’ll take your word for it. How is Regulus, anyway?” 

“Thrilled to have the flat to himself for a week.” 

“Do your parents know he’s home alone?” 

“Of course not,” Sirius said, shaking his head, and watching the play of the tree branches flickering in the minimal firelight still stuttering from their campfire, casting skeletal fingers across the thin nylon of their tent. In a few weeks there would be buds and leaves unfurling along the tips of the branches, flooding the trail in a spill of green and gold, but for now it was still barren. Sirius shivered as the branches trembled in the wind. 

“If they had any idea that I wasn’t home with him they’d have dragged him back with them immediately. But he’s seventeen. He’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself for a week.” 

“You’re ready to go check on him, aren’t you?” Remus asked, tugging on Sirius’ arm until they were both laying down again, wrapped in heavy sleeping bags so that the shivering finally stopped as their body heat filled the minimal spaces between them. Sirius felt his eyes getting heavy. 

“Yeah, I kind of am,” he admitted, tucking his head under Remus’ chin and falling asleep before he could hear the reply.

*

Sirius kissed Remus goodbye, only lingering for a moment. The wind was still whipping around, and it was colder in among the stone and pavement than it had been while they had been camping. The sun was casting a hazy light down, and Sirius wanted nothing more than to drag Remus inside with him. But he had promised himself that he wouldn’t do that to Regulus, so reluctantly he let go. 

“Call me tonight, yeah?” 

“Of course,” Remus answered, dropping one last kiss at the edge of his jaw, before turning around and sliding back into his rusted-out Vauxhall, waving and heading back to his own flat. 

As Sirius fished his key out of his pocket and let himself into his flat, he once again gave serious thought to asking Remus to move in with him. He had been planning to ask while they were hiking, but he had lost his nerve somewhere in the chilly forest, afraid of not getting the answer he wanted. 

The door creaked open and Sirius frowned, sure that it hadn’t made that sound when he left. Dropping his pack just inside the door, the first thing that Sirius noticed was the smell. Metallic, and meaty, and slightly spoiled-smelling. He tried to turn on the lights, flipping the switch only to find that nothing happened. A terrible feeling was settling in the pit of his stomach, churning and leaving him queasy and ready to flee. Except that his brother was supposed to be in the flat. 

Sirius retched once from the smell, then took a deep breath, holding it and pushing into his flat. 

His shoes seemed stuck to the floor, pulling up with a squelch, and he resolutely refused to look down. 

“Regulus?” he called, having to release the breath he had been holding and allowing the smell back in. No answer. Finally, Sirius crossed the room and flipped on the hallway lights, which worked, although when they came on, he found himself wishing they hadn’t. 

Everything was splashed in red, the walls, the floor, drops sprayed in all directions. 

The last thing Sirius saw before he turned and ran from his own flat was the skull and snake painted on the wall of his parlor, red and dripping, starting to turn brown at the edges. 

He screamed, once, then collapsed in the street outside his flat, not even sure if he had called the police or not. Not sure of anything except the blood that covered more of his flat than it spared, and the fact that Regulus wasn’t there.

*

 _SEVEN YEARS LATER_

Sirius was hunched over a small desk in the corner of the library, rain pattering against the window in counterpoint to the buzzing hum of the halogen lights overhead, casting strange shadows. Yellowing newspapers were scattered all over the desk, print staining his fingers a smudgy grey, history blurring against his skin, centuries blending together between the whirls of his fingerprints. 

The librarian, a quiet man with golden brown skin and a beautiful smile, who winked at Sirius every time he came in, walked past carrying a stack of books nearly up to his chin, and Sirius blinked a couple of times, slowly dragging himself through history to the present where he wondered why the librarian wasn’t using a cart. 

He almost asked, but the moment slipped by, flickering into the past while he rubbed his temples. The grey light was dimming, though from more rain or the impending evening, Sirius wasn’t sure. He didn’t wear a watch when he was at the library. He didn’t want to know how many hours he was losing pouring over crumbling newspapers and microfiche, breathing musty air and trying not to smell stale blood. 

The police said that the sigil left in blood when Regulus went missing didn’t necessarily mean that it was a cult. The police also said that they would find Regulus. Seven years later and they had stopped looking. Everyone had stopped looking. Except Sirius. 

Headlines spilled across the small tabletop, spanning the last century. 

**CULT OF DEATH LEAVES FIVE BODIES IN ITS WAKE** 1997 

**TWO MISSING, CULT OF DEATH SUSPECTED** 1954 

**RADICAL OUTLAWS, DUBBED THE CULT OF DEATH, LEAVE THREE BODIES AND FOUR MISSING** 1879 

There were gruesome pictures, grainy black-and-whites, of a skull with a snake crawling out of its mouth, painted in blood on the wall from one of the articles. The same image that he found on the wall of his flat the day that Regulus had disappeared. 

Sighing, he gathered up the collection of papers he had been scanning and prepared to return them all. While he remained convinced that the Cult of Death was somehow involved in Regulus’ disappearance, the decades old, and in some cases centuries old, accounts of unsolved incidents were not getting him any closer to finding his brother. 

The light directly over his head flickered for a moment, buzzing as it shivered back on, and he glanced up, watching as the light bloomed back to life and trying not to yawn. 

Stretching hard enough to make his back pop in three different locations, Sirius finally stood and picked up all the articles that had been littering his work space. A little scrap of paper fluttered out from between the pages of one of the newspapers and landed alone on the table’s faux wood surface. 

_**He has been sent to the Twilight House. Stop looking for him!**_

The stack of newspapers, some of them old and delicate, went crashing to the table as he scooped up the little scrap of paper; handwriting spikey, stabbing Sirius through the heart. 

After years of dead ends, he now had a new place to start looking.

*

Remus stood staring at the weathered sign indicating the start of the trail, battered pack resting at his feet. It was a fading twilight sort of day, where the clouds refused to part, but it didn’t feel like rain. Determined, he locked his car and stowed the key in the safety of one of the inner pockets of his backpack and slung the heavy bag across his shoulders, marching off into the rapidly thickening trees. 

He wasn’t about to let a little inclement weather deter him from making the hike that he had made every year at this time for as long as he could remember. First with his father, then to honor his father, and finally to honor everything he had lost seven years ago. 

Marlene liked to tell him how morbid it was that he continued to hike the same trail he had been hiking when it all went wrong, but Remus couldn’t think of a better way to preserve the memory of the last time he had been happy, so he continued to make his yearly pilgrimage. 

The smell of evergreen slowly overcame everything else, and he took a deep breath, willing himself to at least make it to his first stopping point before allowing himself to cry. The loamy smell of the earth mixed with the brittle smell of the frost finally thawing, and it took Remus back. Memories had their own smell, and for Remus they always smelled of the earth, the trees, and the bitter cold. 

Detritus from the previous autumn, slowly being revealed as the winter faded away, crunched underfoot, brittle and winter dry. Remus’ pack was heavy on his shoulders, and he knew that he would have bruises where the straps were digging. They were nearly worn through, but they had held when he had tested them at home, so he was eking one last year out of the pack. The nearly indiscernible padding, however, wasn’t something he had taken into consideration. He shifted the weight closer to his core and onto more muscle, away from the bone ridges of his shoulders, and kept going, grateful that the first day was a fairly easy trek. 

Walking this trail was almost the same as time travel, and Remus closed his eyes for a long moment, wishing, not for the first time, that he didn’t have to do this alone. Because despite what his friends said, he did have to do it, one way or the other. He had never been very good at letting go. Getting on with things as he needed to, perhaps, but moving on seemed to be beyond him, so he dealt with his grief the only way he knew how. By bottling it up and letting it out in drips and drabs over the course of a week-long hike once a year. So far it had been getting him through.

*

Traditional research had gotten Sirius nowhere, but a few dollars in the right hands had him standing outside of a seedy looking new age shop, reading the hand-carved wooden sign that read _Closed_ , tacked crookedly to the door. The awning, a swirling mass of blues and purples flecked with little gold stars, was dripping on his shoulder, and Sirius took a step forward, crowding against the building, but out of the hazy rain that hadn’t let up for days. 

With a deep breath, Sirius rapped a knuckle against the faded and peeling yellow paint job, risking splinters as well as an invitation into the strange shop that would, hopefully, hold the answers he sought. 

A large eye made impossibly larger by thick glasses peered around the heavy velvet curtain that draped over the windows beside the door, making Sirius startle backwards and into the rain. 

Swearing under his breath and shaking his hair out, he resigned himself to being damp for the rest of the day. 

“Who’s there? Can’t you see we’re closed?” 

“I’m looking for a Sybill Trelawney. Mundungus Fletcher sent me.” 

“I’m sorry, but today is a bad day for readings. Can’t you feel it in the air?” 

“That’s fine. I’m not here for a reading,” Sirius said, wiping the rain from his face and stepping closer to the glass. “I’m here to find out about the Twilight House.” 

The door creaked open quickly and a hand snaked out, grabbing Sirius by the wrist and pulling hard so that he tumbled inside, the door slamming closed behind him. 

The woman staring at him had a mass of tumbled curls held back with a gauzy scarf covered in wildflowers, a large amethyst hanging from her neck and beads clattering at her wrists. Sirius immediately felt less at ease and wondered how this woman could possibly help him find his brother. 

The memory of his mother’s obsession with soothsayers and palm readings right after Regulus had disappeared soured Sirius to even the idea of this place, but he was getting desperate. A trait common enough to members of his family, although, in his case, manifesting more in dedication and less in heavy drinking and fits of violent anger. Genetics were strong in his family, and he wasn’t above acknowledging it, if only to try and avoid some of the more prevalent unsavory traits. 

“Don’t ever speak that name where it might hear you!” Sybill Trelawney hissed, whirling around and flinging herself into a high-backed chair with fading velvet cushions. 

“How can a place hear you?” Sirius asked, looking around for somewhere to sit, but finding the dim room nearly entirely covered in crystals and books and half-finished cups of tea. 

Sweeping a hand out and knocking over a pile of cushions, Trelawney gestured at the low bench she had cleared and waited until Sirius sat beside her. “The Twilight House isn’t a place, not in the technical sense. It’s a liminal space in between the worlds, a sort of purgatory, if you will. It exists everywhere and nowhere. Why would you need to know about that? _How_ would you know about that?” 

Reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket Sirius pulled out the now crumpled note that had appeared on his desk at the library two weeks earlier and handed it over. 

Taking the slip of paper gingerly Trelawney studied it for a moment before handing it back and flicking her fingers afterwards as if she wanted to rid herself of the feel of it. 

“If this is true, whoever it is you are looking for is beyond you. If it’s not true, then you would do best to ignore it.” 

The weight Sirius had been carrying around for the last seven years pushed hard on his shoulders until he was slumped beneath it, trying to remember how to breathe. “He’s my brother. I have to try. Can you help me? Please? I have to know. I have to.” His voice cracked on the last few words, and Sirius dropped his head into his hands, hair dripping into his lap. 

“This can only lead to death,” Trelawney offered quietly, voice solid for the first time since Sirius had entered the shop. 

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.” 

Rising slowly from her seat, Trelawney slowly crossed the room to the small counter which held the till and a wildly overgrown spider plant, and opened a small locked box from the shelf behind it. For a moment the foliage blocked Sirius’ view of her entirely. 

“I will give you this, but I beg you to reconsider.” She held out a yellowed piece of paper with a map crudely inked in the corner as she stepped back away from the counter. 

“That’s the one thing I can’t do,” Sirius said softly, taking the paper and leaving the shop.

*

Remus Lupin shouldered his hiking pack again, the compass in his hand spinning wildly, unable to settle on a direction, or even a stable setting. Smacking the compass against his leg, he sighed and stuck it back in his pocket, tipping his head back. 

The sky was a flat grey, the kind that went on until the horizon finally cut it down, cotton-hazy, oppressive. 

“Okay, Remus, pull yourself together. You’ve hiked this trail every year for most of your life, you know where you’re going without a compass.” The malfunctioning compass had his brain spinning as wildly as the needle, and without even access to the sun for direction suddenly one tree looked very like another, even on this trail that was as familiar to him as his own flat. 

He tried very hard not to think about the last time the weather had been this bad while he had hiked this path. Young and in love and so very foolish to hope that it could last. The way they had slept under the stars, black hair tumbling over his face as they twined together, watching the moon rise over a pale shoulder while he was being held. 

Shaking his head and hoping to chase the memories away, Remus grit his teeth and marched forward, hoping he was moving in the right direction. Nothing looked as he remembered it. He felt like he was caught in a nightmare-warped version of his memories, and everywhere he looked everything was twisted and bent, spinning him farther from anything he recognized.

*

Sirius pulled the folded-up map that Trelawney had given him out of his pocket for what must have been the twenty-third time in the last hour, staring at the marked area on the yellowing page of spidery topographical lines. 

“Of fucking course,” he muttered to himself, leaning against the edge of his bedframe, the heavy cherrywood digging into his hip and grounding him just a little. 

Closing his eyes, he could almost smell the trail, the leaves crackling under his boots, hear Remus’ laughter as they tumbled through the dusky woods, barely making it to their next destination before they crashed together, all bare skin and broken sighs. The taste of sweat and the scent of his hair struck him so vividly that Sirius had to sit down, hard, trying to shake the memories of the last time he had been happy. 

He blinked heavily, the small bedroom, still furnished with heavy furniture from his parents’ house, scuffed and battered and of no use to his mother anymore, slowly came back into focus. The comforter smelled musty with the disuse of weeks of catching only a few hours of sleep on the sofa, passing out amongst his research, crumpled newsprint as a pillow. 

Scrubbing a hand over his face and then up through his hair, Sirius forced himself upright. It took a couple of deep breaths before he could force himself to the wardrobe in the back corner of the room. The one he hadn’t opened since he had moved in. The one he had paid the movers extra to fill for him so he wouldn’t have to look at the contents. He had almost left everything that was in it behind, but he hadn’t been able to let go of the hope that someday he might have use of it again, in better circumstances than these. Circumstances that involved reconciliations and happy endings. Things that now seemed far out of his reach. 

The dark wood was dusty, and Sirius fought the urge to snort out through his nose, rather than inhale any more grime. Sneezing, he wrenched the door open, the groan of stiff hinges reverberating throughout the room. He could feel the weight of the years settling onto his shoulders like the tattered hiking pack he pulled out of the wardrobe, still packed from the last time it had been used. 

He had promised himself that he wouldn’t touch it again until he figured out what had happened to Regulus, but he had never been very good at keeping his promises to himself.

*

Remus stopped by a small stream in the fast approaching gloom. There was a fine lacey edge of frost, fragile and glittering, along the edges of the water, making the stream appear much smaller than he remembered. It also seemed to be moving slower than he remembered. 

Sighing, Remus pulled out a small filter pack before filling up his water bottle from the stream, not trusting the now sluggish, half frozen water to actually be drinkable, as it had been in the past. If all the watering holes he remembered were this affected by the overly dry winter and spring, he might not have enough filters. 

Dense oak and aspen trees, just starting to bristle with unfurled leaves, were casting long shadows, and Remus dropped his pack at his feet. He had been hoping to make it a few more miles, but the gathering clouds had him rethinking that plan. 

Unrolling his small, single person tent, Remus started jamming the stakes into the ground, keeping one eye on the flat white clouds, slowly blanketing the entire sky in a muffling cotton that felt heavy just to look at. They looked like snow clouds, but Remus was fairly sure that this trail never went high enough in elevation to risk snow, even this early in the season. It had never been a problem before, but he was grateful for his flint and the abundance of small branches for a fire anyway. 

Despite his confidence in the weather, however, just as Remus popped the last pole into his tent and rolled out his sleeping bag, the first snowflakes began to flutter across the horizon.

*

As Sirius stared down the sign for the trail, he felt the world tilt sideways, sliding backwards seven years to the last time he had been here, hand in hand with Remus, happy and so very in love. 

Regulus had only been seventeen, but he had insisted that Sirius take this vacation, that he would be fine alone. Sirius never saw him again, and in his guilt, had never seen Remus again, either. 

There was a crushing moment where he wanted to smash the sign down, break it into a trillion little pieces so that he could never see the marker for the day his life fell apart again, but he knew that a sign was just a sign, and that breaking it wouldn’t put his life back together. He couldn’t transfer all the shattered edges of his existence onto an innocuous piece of wood and hope they would stick there while he walked away from them. 

Clouds meandered their way across the sky, causing the sunlight to flicker in and out, and promising a cool day. Sirius huddled down in his jacket hoping that it wasn’t an indicator that the weather was about to take a turn towards he-shouldn't-be-camping-in-this. Casting one last glance behind him towards his car, and the handful of other vehicles parked at the beginning of the trail head, without really seeing any of them, Sirius shouldered his pack and started walking, the leaves slowly closing in over his head until he could no longer see the sun at all.

*

Remus was huddled in his tent, his sleeping bag and all his clothes bundled around him as he shivered against the late season snow. He hadn’t trusted falling asleep, crawling out from his tent every hour to stoke the fire, tiny white flakes swirling around and steadily building up on the ground. There wasn’t much firewood left, and soon he was going to have to pack up and head back, allowing the snow to cut his memorial trek short. 

A gust of wind cut through the thin nylon of his tent and Remus cursed softly to himself, muscles clenching and unclenching with the fine tremors that were starting to ripple through his limbs. 

“That’s it,” he hissed to himself, as much to convince himself he was still there as for any need to hear his own words. “It’ll have to be better if I’m moving.” 

He spent a few more minutes convincing himself to crawl out from what little insulation he had managed to find, but eventually he emerged, packing away his clothes and sleeping bag as quickly as he could. It took every ounce of willpower he had to not just abandon the tent entirely. He was only one healthy day’s hike out so far, and he could always replace the tent. It sounded preferable to taking the time to unstake it and roll it up and secure it on his pack, but ultimately, he decided not to risk the snow slowing him down enough for it to take more than a day to get back to his car. If he had to spend a second night out in this storm he would need the protection. 

By the time he got his tent unmoored the fire had gone out, and the leaves were hissing in the wind, making him shiver from more than the cold. 

That’s when he heard the howl. 

“What the fuck?” he asked the wind, whirling around to check behind him, but he didn’t see anything. 

When the howl rang out a second time, far closer than the first one, he dropped the half-rolled tent and grabbed up his bag. “There aren’t any wolves left. What howls?” He was almost glad when nothing answered, and he marched off the way he had come just as the edges of the sky began to lighten, grey and ashy, flickering shadows over the tracks he was leaving behind him.

*

Eight hours after he started out and Sirius was starting to rethink his plan, which had consisted of little more than rushing off as soon as he had any idea what direction to point his feet. What had at first looked like an overcast day had quickly turned into flurries of snow, flitting down around his worn-out hiking boots, making his heavy jacket look sooty. 

Lack of light was making it difficult for him to pinpoint his direction, and when he pulled out his compass it had begun spinning wildly, offering him no assistance at all. Sirius stared at it for a moment, then flung it against a nearby tree, cracking the face into little fissures that scattered to the soil, blending in with the slowly accumulating snow. 

“For Regulus,” he said softly, needing to hear the words even if they were in his own voice, whispering through the trees, getting lost in the slowly growing winds. 

Turning in the direction he thought he had been heading, Sirius started off again, only to pull up short a few meters later, blinking around at his surroundings. The trees, buds barely starting to form on the edges of skeletal branches, were swaying sharply when the wind gusted up, twisting the shadows all around him, but despite the shifting light he was sure he had already been through the clearing he was staring at. 

“Well, bugger.” 

Before he had a chance to look around and try and regain his bearings, a heavy weight crashed into his back sending him sprawling to the ground, knee slamming into a sharp root, coiling insidiously up through the mulch and frost. 

“I’m so sorry, I...” The voice behind Sirius trailed off. The very familiar voice. “Sirius?” 

“Bugger,” Sirius hissed for the second time in only moments, not sure if he meant it more over Remus running into him or simply the fact that it was Remus at all. If he was honest with himself, probably both. 

The chance to ask Remus was he was doing there slipped by as fingers clamped down on his forearm hard enough to leave bruises, nails only not breaking the skin thanks to the heavy padding of his jacket. 

“You have to get up, we have to keep moving,” Remus hissed, tugging ineffectively at Sirius’ arm. 

“Remus, what are you doing here?” 

“We don’t have time,” Remus said in place of an answer, still tugging on Sirius’ arm, eyes darting around them, whites showing on all sides. 

“Remus, please, we have all the time we need. How about we sit down and you tell me what’s going on, okay?” 

“No, no, no, no. We have to keep moving.” 

Sirius shoved himself to his feet, but refused to allow himself to be shepherded. The snow was swirling harder, making it almost impossible for Sirius to see more than a few meters, and even if whatever had spooked Remus was still coming, it wouldn’t do to rush off and get even more lost. 

“What is going on, Remus. Please talk to me.” 

“Oh, now you want to talk to me?” Remus snapped, eyes focusing on Sirius as if seeing him for the first time. Sirius let the dig go, knowing that on some level he had earned it. 

“Look, you can yell at me all you want for being a selfish berk. I was. But right now, I just want to find Regulus.” 

“Believe me, I’d love to hash out old hurts with you, Sirius, but I knew how rash you could be, and I was honestly less surprised by your leaving than I maybe should have been. But right now, we have to move, before the wolf gets here. We can do all this blame-laying some other time.” 

Sirius startled, squinting down at Remus and noticing for the first time, the way his eyes didn’t seem to stop moving, the little fissures of red crackling through them, the bruise-like purple shadows beneath them, the way he was breathing in stuttering bursts even though he had stopped running. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, his pack haphazardly packed, bedroll listing dangerously to one side, threatening to fall. Sirius didn’t see any signs of a tent anywhere. 

“There aren’t any wolves, Remus. I think you need some rest. I was going to set up camp soon anyway, how about you stay with me for now, yeah?” The thought of having Remus so close for an extended period of time, even a single night, made Sirius’ chest clench in a way that he hadn’t felt in years. He wanted to run as far away as he could, rescind the offer and flee into the forest, but the snow was starting to pile up on the ground, wiping away any traces of their path. 

“Do you think I don’t know that there aren’t any wolves?” Remus bit out, words clipped but focused, and Sirius had to step back, reassessing his first impression of Remus as delirious. He certainly sounded sane, even if his words made no sense. “That doesn’t take away from the fact that I saw it, Sirius.” 

“Well, I don’t hear any wolves now, so how about you help me set up camp and we can figure it out, okay?” Sirius asked, hating the pandering tone his voice had taken, but Remus was acting strange enough that he was loath to let him out of his sight. 

Remus gave him a long look that Sirius couldn’t decipher before his shoulders slumped in a gesture of defeat that Sirius recognized from when they were younger and happier. “We are both going to regret this.” 

“I’ve regretted a lot of things in my life, what’s one more?” 

Remus snorted and it was such a familiar sound that Sirius forgot, for a brief moment, that things were slowly spiraling out of his control. He wanted to curl up in that sound and let Remus’ amused disdain wash over him until they were seven years younger, and decades happier, wanted to pretend that they were whole and unbroken instead of ill-fitting shards trying to remember where their edges connected. 

“Right, what’s one more regret.” It wasn’t a question, and Remus just sort of slumped to the ground as if someone had cut his strings, letting him collapse in the snow and mud, heedless of the cold. 

“Remus,” Sirius started, then he stopped, not quite sure how to articulate what it was that he wanted to say. Remus just sat there in the rapidly accumulating snow and watched him, waiting with a patience that Sirius had made himself forget over the years. “You do know that I don’t regret you, right?” he asked, finally, not sure that the question even came close to conveying just how much he had never regretted Remus, only the circumstances that had surrounded them. 

Remus shrugged and Sirius swore under his breath, shrugging off his pack and unstrapping the small tent from the top. It wasn’t really designed for two people, but it wasn’t as if he and Remus had never been in close quarters before. 

“We’re really going to have to have this conversation, aren’t we,” Sirius said, shaking his head, not really making it a question. “I’m going to get this tent set up while you see if you can’t get the biggest fire we dare going so we don’t freeze to death, and then we’re going to talk.” 

“Can’t we just leave, get back to the cars, and then talk?” Remus asked, glancing around like he was expecting to be set upon at any moment. 

Sirius picked up his compass, needle still spinning wildly, and tossed it into Remus’ lap. He shrugged. “If you can tell me which way the cars are, gladly.” 

“Fuck,” Remus hissed, staring despondently at Sirius’ compass. “Mine was doing that, too. I had hoped that it was just busted.” 

“Okay,” Sirius allowed, frowning. “That’s a little strange.” 

“A lot strange is going on, here, Sirius. Compasses that don’t work, snow that should never be falling this late in the season, wolves howling where there aren’t any wolves. Something is very wrong out here.” 

Finally stopping to take full stock of the situation, Sirius pulled back and really looked at Remus. He looked older than Sirius remembered. Of course, the same could probably be said for him. He didn’t really spend a lot of time looking in mirrors these days. There were snowflakes catching in Remus’ hair, dusting it an ashy grey and making Sirius want to promise him anything as long as he’d go back to being the Remus he used to know. 

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” he said, finally, dropping his pack into the slowly accumulating snow, heedless of the way the snow was slowly soaking through the bottom and probably into his clothes. If the snow built up much farther it wouldn’t matter anyway. 

“Very kind of you to notice,” Remus said, dropping his head into his hands. “The question is, what do we plan to do about it?” 

Sirius warmed to that word, _we_ and he gave in, sinking down to the ground beside Remus and letting his hand slowly, tentatively, reach out and brush against Remus’ knee. When Remus didn’t pull away, he let his hand settle there, relishing the small amount of human contact, which he hadn’t had any more than incidentally for years. 

“I think the first thing to do is get a fire going, if we can.” Sirius wanted to talk about that word, _we_ , but he also knew that this was not the time to try and repair his mistakes. They would freeze to death before they had enough time to address them all. 

Sirius leveraged himself back up from the ground, ignoring the way his knees creaked. His denims were soaked through, and the cold was starting to seep into his bones. The sooner they got a fire going, pile up the sleeping bags in the tent, and get out of the wind and snow, the better they were both going to be. 

“I thought you wanted to get the tent pitched,” Remus said, still hunkered down on the ground, snow swirling around his ankles in tiny cyclones of white. 

Holding out a hand, Sirius shook his head. “I suspect, if we don’t get a fire going soon, we won’t be able to. The tent can wait for now.” 

With a sharp nod that seemed to be more to himself than in response to Sirius, Remus reached up and grabbed Sirius’ hand, letting Sirius haul him to his feet. Sirius held on for a moment longer than he should have, relishing in the warmth of Remus’ skin against his own, before he finally pulled back abruptly and stooped to his pack and pulled out a thick pair of gloves, tossing them at Remus. “You’re going to want those before long.” 

“What about you?” 

“You know I run hotter than you,” Sirius shrugged, lying and trying not to shiver despite his heavy jacket. When Remus didn’t call him on his bullshit, Sirius tucked his bare hands into his pockets and started kicking away the snow that had piled up, trying to clear a space to keep a fire burning. 

They scrounged for wood not so new it wouldn’t burn, but small enough and dry enough that they wouldn’t need tools to break it apart, since Sirius hadn’t thought to bring an axe with him, and Remus appeared to have left all his gear behind in his flight. 

They didn’t speak at all.

*

The cold was seeping into Remus’ fingers, making his knuckles stiff and his grip clumsy. Despite the gloves Sirius had given him, he kept having to stop and tuck his hands beneath his jacket, close to his body, to recirculate some heat through them. He knew that Sirius had to have been lying about not needing them, but he was just selfish enough to not be able to give them up, telling himself that if they didn’t have the tent up within the hour, he would give Sirius a turn with them. 

Sirius. Remus snuck a glance at him under the guise of depositing a bundle of kindling into the small clearing that Sirius had managed to dig out in the snow. There was snow dusting his dark hair, making the grey streaks at his temples stand out. Grey that hadn’t been there the last time Remus had seen him. Nearly as much grey as was in Remus’ own hair. It would have made him smile, the signs of aging, if they had been in other circumstances. As it was, he tucked the image away in his memory in case this was the last time he was allowed to see it. 

There was some scruff on Sirius’ chin that spoke more to a lack of attention and care than to any sort of intent, and it made Remus’ heart squeeze in his chest. The Sirius he had known would never have neglected his appearance like that. Remus wanted to get home, and immediately bundle Sirius up and not let him go again until they were both healthy and whole, but he knew that even if they did somehow manage to get safely out of this, that sort of attention was no longer allowed from him. 

He dumped a second load of most-likely-too-green wood into the small pile they had accumulated and sighed. “We should probably get that lit before it gets too much darker,” he said, watching as Sirius slipped in the now rapidly building snow. 

Sirius nodded and dug a small lighter out of his pocket. Remus’ first reaction was to chide Sirius for not having flint that couldn’t run out of fuel, but he bit his tongue. They were in enough trouble without bickering adding any more strain to the situation. 

After a couple of futile tries the lighter caught, and Remus peeled off his gloves and grabbed a small cluster of fresh leaves, cupping them in his hands and hoping they would light. 

Their luck sparked for a moment, and the leaves ignited on the first try, and Remus carefully set them in the center of the stack of wood, despite the burning to his hands. There was a crackling pop and the smallest twigs started to smoke and singe, and then, finally, there was a flame licking its way up the wood. 

“Oh, thank fuck,” Sirius breathed, closer to Remus’ ear than he had realized. “I was afraid that wouldn’t work.” 

“And that’s why you bring a flint,” Remus sighed, unable to help himself. 

Sirius just snorted in response. “I didn’t have time to get one.” 

“What are you doing out here, anyway? I didn’t think this was exactly your thing if left to your own devices.” 

Sirius scrubbed a hand through his hair, exhaustion making him look older than their missing seven years should have added up to. There were fine lines at the corners of his eyes that Remus wouldn’t have suspected Sirius to be capable of forming for at least another decade, if ever. He had always seemed eternally youthful. 

“I’m looking for a lead on Regulus,” Sirius admitted after a long, quiet moment. 

“Out here?” Remus asked, frowning and holding his still-gloveless hands over the slowly growing flames, trying to regain some sensation in his fingers. He handed the gloves back to Sirius, who seemed, for a moment, like he was going to refuse them. Eventually he tucked them into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled-up piece of paper that he held out for Remus. It looked like some sort of map that Remus couldn’t decipher, old and tattered and in no way indicating how it could be leading Sirius to Regulus. 

“We should get the tent up before it gets any darker so we can get out of this wind.” It was the only answer Remus got, and he didn’t push the issue. He would ask Sirius to make sense of all of this as soon as they survived. 

“Yeah, okay.” 

It was the work of maybe an hour to get the tent fully pitched. Most of the work had been trying to get the stakes into the frozen ground. Ground that Remus could have sworn wasn’t frozen the night before when he had pitched his own tent, now abandoned in his abruptly halted flight. 

As soon as the last pole was placed and the tent was freestanding, they both crawled inside, pressed side by side in the small space, the flap at the front of the tent left open so that some of the heat from the fire could get inside. It immediately got smoky, but not so much that they couldn’t breathe, so neither of them moved to do anything about it. 

Remus kept to his side of the tent as best as he could, huddled in on himself, knees tucked up inside his jacket, trying not to take up more space than he had to. He had had dreams about being this near Sirius again, for years after Sirius had left. And yet now that they were both in the same place again, Remus could barely even bring himself to look. He wasn’t sure if he was angry, heartbroken, or both, but he knew this was simply not the time to try and face it. 

The flames crackled and spit as snowflakes hissed out into steam as they landed on the fire. It was still burning for now, but Remus was afraid that it wasn’t nearly large enough to make it through the night. As soon as he could feel his toes again he would suggest that they go build it up a little more before hunkering down for the night. 

He was so focused on the fire that he actually jumped at the first touch of fingers on his shoulder, light enough that he could barely feel them through his jacket. 

“Remus,” Sirius said softly, voice as hollow as the wind. “Come here.”

*

“It’ll be warmer if we share body heat,” Sirius said, trying not to look too hard at any possible ulterior motives he might have for asking Remus to cuddle. For a moment he was afraid that Remus would refuse, and he wouldn’t have even blamed him, except that his original statement was the larger part of the truth. It was too cold for either of them to hold onto their grudges. “Look, I get it, I wouldn’t really want to have to touch me either, right now. I was terrible to you. But is that really worth freezing over? Just come here, you bloody stubborn git, and you can go back to hating me once we’re out of here and properly warm again, okay?” 

“I don’t hate you, Sirius.” The words came so softly that he nearly missed them. “I was angry at first, but the truth of it is, if I had hated you, I wouldn’t have been angry, just glad you were gone, and that was something I never managed to be.” 

“I missed you, too,” Sirius admitted. 

Remus sighed and tucked himself under Sirius’ offered arm. “I wouldn’t go that far.” 

The sleeping bag that Sirius had brought was balled up in his lap, and it took a few minutes of struggling, and a hand from Remus for them to get it unzipped without having to separate long enough for the cold air to get into the small spaces between them. Eventually they got the heavy, quilted material draped around them both, and slowly the fear of freezing to death started to dissipate, even as the sun fully set and the temperature began to plummet. 

“Once we get out of here, would you like to get coffee with me?” Remus asked, some time later, as Sirius was just starting to doze off, or lose consciousness, he wasn’t sure which. The cold was making his thoughts slow and sluggish, hazy around the edges like they were rimed in frost. 

“What?” 

“Coffee, maybe try again.” Remus wasn’t looking at him, but Sirius could feel a fine tremor running through him that didn’t feel like shivering. 

He didn’t answer for a long time, his guilt warring with years of longing and missing Remus, until he wasn’t sure what the right answer was anymore. There was still a part of him that felt like if he allowed himself to be happy before he knew what had happened to Regulus that it was the same thing as giving up on him, on declaring that he didn’t care, had never cared. But this ill-advised search for the Twilight House was his last lead, and after years of dedicating himself to a search that had done nothing but run him in circles and alienate everyone he had once held close, he was finally ready to admit to himself that he wanted to live. 

“Yeah, I’d like that.” 

“Really?” Remus asked, sounding startled, and Sirius almost smiled, despite the cold. 

Before he had a chance to answer, however, he heard the howl. 

“What the bloody fuck was that?” 

“That,” Remus said slowly, arm going tight around Sirius’ back, “was the wolf that doesn’t exist.” 

“That can’t be a wolf, Remus, it can’t.” 

“I’m well aware of that, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is a wolf out there, and that we’re in nothing but a flimsy nylon tent, freezing, while it stalks us.” 

Sirius tightened his arm around Remus and pulled the sleeping bag tighter around them with his other arm. “You don’t know that it’s stalking us, whatever it is, it could just be in the same area by chance.” 

“Two nights in a row, Sirius? We can’t stay here.” 

“We can’t go out there, either. We won’t make it a kilometer before we freeze. We have no idea where we are or how to get out of here, especially in the dark.” 

Remus sagged against his shoulder, and Sirius dared to rest his cheek on the top of Remus’ head. “I know, Sirius, I do. But I don’t know what to do. We can’t just wait for it to get here.” 

“Let’s worry about it if we hear it again, okay? We can hope it’s as turned around in the snow as we are.” 

Remus didn’t answer, but he leaned in just a little closer, shivering, as they both watched the flames start to die down as the snow piled up around what little wood remained burning. Sirius knew they would have to go gather more if they were going to make it through the night, but he didn’t say anything, afraid to voice any more concerns out loud. 

“We’re going to be okay,” he whispered, as much for himself as for Remus. “We’re going to be okay.”

*

Remus was trying to keep his eyes open, battling the lethargy the cold was imparting combined with having been awake for nearly forty-eight hours. They hadn’t heard the howling again and he was starting to lose track of the time as the fire slowly dwindled. He knew that they needed to get up and add some more wood but he couldn’t seem to find the energy to move. Sirius was dozing or fully asleep against his shoulder, and that was bad, too, but still Remus didn’t move. 

When the howl sounded for the second time Remus wasn’t even sure he had actually heard it. Blinking heavily, he pried his sticky eyes open and strained to pick out any sound besides the wind and the small popping from what was left of their fire. There was nothing at first, and he was nearly ready to dismiss it as a hallucination when the sound came again, from somewhere much nearer. 

A spike of adrenaline served to wake him up with a jolt, and he lurched away from Sirius, grabbing his shoulder and shaking. 

“Sirius.” No response. “Sirius wake up!” 

“I’m awake,” Sirius mumbled, sitting up a little more fully, and flexing his fingers as if to work the chill out of them. 

“It’s back,” Remus hissed, keeping his voice low and grabbing Sirius’ hands as much for his own comfort as to try and warm them a little. 

“What is?” 

“Whatever is howling out there. And it sounds close.” 

As if to punctuate his comment, the howling came again, this time followed by what sounded like a snuffling noise from only meters behind their tent. 

“We need to go. Now!” Remus said, clambering out of the tent, Sirius’ hands still in his so that Sirius was half dragged with him. 

“What about –” 

“You can afford to replace it,” Remus answered before Sirius had a chance to even finish asking. He saw a flash of fur in among the trees, the moonlight and the glow of the fire giving the pale strands a reddish hue. “I finally found you again, I’m not losing you over a damned tent, let’s go.” 

Sirius allowed himself to be dragged away from the direction the sounds were coming from, only stumbling in the snow a little bit. While they had been huddled to keep warm the snow had piled higher than Remus had ever seen it, making their flight slow going, and their tracks easy to spot. 

The air was biting, much colder with the sun down, and Remus was wheezing as his lungs slowly crackled with the cold. He could no longer breathe through his nose, and he kept tasting the snow with every inhale. His boots, designed for traction on loose dirt, were soaked through and he couldn’t feel his toes at all, his pants were damp halfway up his shins and climbing. 

Beside him, Sirius was panting, trying to keep up as they fled blindly further into the trees, snowflakes like stars around them as they ran through the pitch black. 

“Slow up a minute,” Sirius said, breathy and faint despite the fact that they were still linked by the hands and he couldn’t have been more than a few centimeters behind Remus. “I need to breathe.” 

Remus didn’t hear any sounds of pursuit, so he allowed himself to be tugged to a stop, perspiration freezing to his cheeks. He could taste blood where his lip had split from the wind. Sirius had dropped his hand in favor of doubling over, hands on his knees, gasping air in giant lungfuls. Everything was quiet, but Remus could still feel his pulse at his temples, tasting metal at the back of his throat. 

“Are you okay to keep going?” Remus asked, gently putting his hand on the small of Sirius’ back, an intimacy he wouldn’t have dared a few hours earlier. 

“I don’t think I have much choice,” Sirius answered grimly, straightening up and shaking off Remus’ hand. 

The urge to assure Sirius that they weren’t going to die out there was strong, but Remus refrained, unsure how to be of any comfort when he didn’t believe it himself. Instead, he simply laced their fingers together again, and started pushing forward, at a slower pace. 

The tremors started not long after, shivers so forceful that Remus was sure he was going to break bones. They seemed to reverberate through him, down his arm, into Sirius through their joined hands, and back up into Remus again, an endless loop of human seismic activity. 

“Wait, wait, stop!” Sirius gasped, pulling up short, and nearly toppling Remus into the snow with the abruptness of it. 

“What?” Remus asked, fear spiking through him as he looked around wildly for what could have grabbed Sirius’ attention. 

“Lights!” Sirius pointed through the trees. 

And far off in the distance, Remus saw it. A huge house, far enough away to be little more than a spec of hope.

*

Sirius was sure that they were never going to make it to the house. For every meter Remus dragged him the house seemed to be three more farther away. He stumbled to the ground twice, soaked through, but so cold that he couldn’t feel the damp anymore. Every time he went down Remus hauled him back up again, a wildness in his eyes that Sirius felt deep down within himself. 

They were past the point of being able to speak, every frozen breath labored, every footfall more energy than either of them had left. He was no longer looking where he was going, simply letting Remus drag him along, feeling guilty for making Remus do all the work, but not having anything left to give even to his own survival. He wasn’t sure how Remus was still going, beyond pure determination. Remus always did have greater survival instincts than he did. 

The sun was just starting to come up, casting everything in a pale blue glow just tinged with orange around the edges, when Remus finally came to a stop, Sirius immediately sagging against his side and nearly knocking them both over. 

“We’re going to be okay,” Remus breathed, pointing at the house that they had finally reached, just before he kissed Sirius. 

It was a brief thing, relief made tangible more than anything of intent, but it curled through Sirius anyway, his mouth the only warm point on his body. 

“Okay, now that we’re going to survive, can we just skip the coffee and move straight on to the point where I ask you to move in with me?” Sirius asked, gasping the words into Remus’ neck, afraid to look him in the eye. 

“It’s probably a little too soon for that,” Remus answered, sounding unhappy about it. 

“Oh, it’s definitely too soon,” Sirius said, disentangling them and trying to muster up a smile for Remus. “But how about we do it anyway?” 

“Yeah, okay.” 

Sirius knew it was probably the euphoria of reaching safety, the knowledge that they were somehow going to get out of the mess they had found themselves in, but he let himself hope that Remus meant those words, and would continue to mean them once they were home. 

“Now let’s get inside and work on thawing out,” Remus added, threading his fingers with Sirius and pushing forward. 

The house was large, but almost impossible to make out through the heavy snow, despite how close to it they were. The snow was coming down hard enough that it was hard for Sirius to keep his eyes open, and everything looked bathed in a heavy fog. The sky was a flat, barely-blue-tinged-white that felt heavy, like it was going to come down on them at any moment, and the house was barely more than a dark, imposing shadow. 

There were steps, sagging in the middle, leading up to the entrance, and once they were on the porch, the heavy wooden door came into focus. Carved into the door, in jagged lines, etched deep into the wood, were the words _Welcome to Twilight House – All Welcome_. 

“This is it,” Sirius breathed, scarcely daring to believe it was real, let alone that they had stumbled on it. “This is what I was out here to find.” 

Remus didn’t say anything, just reached up to pound on the door. 

Nothing happened at first, but then, from far inside the house, they could hear footsteps. It took a long couple of moments before the door cracked open a couple of centimeters only to slam immediately shut again. 

“Go away!” The voice inside shouted, tremors running through it heavily enough that Sirius felt they could shake the whole building apart. It was a very familiar voice. “You aren’t welcome here!” Regulus continued, just as Sirius slammed his whole weight into the door, forcing it open and sending his brother sprawling to the ground on the heavily-polished mahogany floor. 

Sirius let his momentum carry him inside as well, but managed to pull up before he tripped over Regulus who was staring up at him, pale-faced and wide-eyed. The door closed with a soft click, and Remus came up behind Sirius, placing a hand on the small of his back. Sirius let himself lean into the touch for a moment, barely even noticing how warm it was now that they were inside, or how that heat wasn’t as scalding as it should have been. 

“How?” Sirius asked, voice soft, trying to keep himself from shouting, or bursting into tears. “No one thought you could possibly have survived.” 

Shoving himself off the ground, Regulus glared at the closed door over Sirius’ shoulder for a moment before his shoulders sagged, and he turned and headed further into the house, gesturing for Sirius and Remus to follow. 

Fighting the urge to shake Regulus and demand immediate answers, Sirius followed close on Regulus’ heels, Remus at his shoulder close enough that their arms brushed with every step. Sirius was grateful for the comfort of it, because he was starting to feel like he was floating off, head spinning, blood rushing in his ears. 

The long hallway opened up onto a large sitting room with stiff looking sofas and an immense fireplace. A fire was blazing and Regulus poked at it listlessly with a heavy iron poker while Remus tugged Sirius onto one of the seats. 

“So, what exactly is going on?” Remus finally asked, hand tight on Sirius’ knee, keeping him sitting when Regulus turned around, face drawn and exhausted looking, and collapsed into the chair facing them. 

“Well, you weren’t wrong, Sirius,” Regulus drawled, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “I didn’t survive.” 

“Clearly you did,” Sirius said, frowning, and putting his hand over Remus’, a tether to keep himself from doing anything stupid like shaking Regulus, or breaking down. 

“No,” Regulus said sadly, shaking his head, the firelight giving his hair strange red highlights, bloody rivulets glinting and fading as he moved. “I didn’t. And now, neither have you.” 

“Excuse me?” Remus’ hand spasmed, and Sirius was sure he was going to have bruises. 

Regulus sighed, closing his eyes and taking a long breath before exhaling slowly. When he opened his eyes again, they were flat white, blank, lifeless. Then he blinked and they were the deep brown that Sirius remembered. “The Twilight House is a place between life and death,” Regulus started, staring Sirius down. “You can only get in if you’ve died before your time. And once you are in, you can never leave.” 

Without saying a word Remus got up from beside Sirius and slowly made his way to the front door. Sirius could just see him pull it open down at the end of the hallway. He stood there for a moment, then tried to take a step outside, before bouncing backwards, tumbling to the ground. 

Sirius was on his feet instantly, running down the hall to Remus, who was just sitting where he landed, wide-eyed, shaking and pale. “Are we really dead?” He whispered, staring over Sirius’ shoulder and ignoring the hand Sirius was holding out to help him up. 

“Unfortunately, yes,” Regulus answered, coming up behind Sirius and clapping him on the shoulder. “I was trying to keep you from coming in. Likely it wouldn’t have mattered, but I have seen one or two people who were turned away who later survived. But once you’re inside it’s too late.” 

“So, there are other people here?” Sirius asked, walking cautiously towards the door, where he could still see the snow blowing heavily around, but he could no longer feel the cold, despite the door being wide open. He was starting to be terrified that Regulus was right. Pushing a hand forward he felt the resistance centimeters before the threshold, and as his hand came up level with the doorframe, it just stopped as if hitting a solid wall. He couldn’t push through. 

“Occasionally. Usually they’ll come in, and once they’re acclimated the house just...” he paused, closed the door nearly against Sirius’ nose, and shrugged when Sirius turned to face him, hand still hovering uselessly in the air. “I’m not sure, exactly. Gives them their own place to exist, with whomever they wish to have in it. I’ve yet to see the same person twice, after their first few days here.” 

“And how did you become the official greeter, then?” Remus asked, hoisting himself off of the ground and sagging into Sirius’ side. 

“Oh, I’m very much not,” Regulus said, smirking a little. “I just happened to hear the pounding on the door this time.” 

“Well, that makes sense,” Sirius said, wrapping his arm around Remus and leaning into him, not sure which of them was trembling. “You never were the most gracious of hosts.” 

“Git,” Regulus snorted, raising an eyebrow at Sirius and shaking his head. “You’re both taking this remarkably well,” he added after a moment. 

“I’m fairly sure that’s just the shock speaking,” Remus said, tugging Sirius away from the door. Sirius allowed himself to be led, keeping the door at his back, sure he wouldn’t be able to face seeing it again for a long time. 

“I know that I, at least, am going to have a meltdown just as soon as I process all of this,” Sirius added when they reentered the sitting room and dropped onto the sofas once more, letting the heat from the fireplace seep into his bones and leave him truly warm for the first time in what felt like years. 

Regulus actually laughed. “You’re always a hairsbreadth from a meltdown, anyway, Sirius.” 

Sirius wanted to argue, to say that it had been years, and that he had grown up quite a bit since he had been that melodramatic kid always fighting with their parents, but he knew that Regulus hadn’t been around to see any of that, so he held his tongue. He would have time to prove the difference. Forever, it seemed. 

Slowly, he forced himself to look at Remus, afraid of what he would find there. “I’m so sorry I apparently got us killed.” 

Remus shook his head. “I was lost before you found me, anyway, Sirius. I suspect this was going to happen either way. At least if I had to die I’m with you.” 

“Oh, fucking hell,” Regulus hissed. “You two are still disgusting, and now I’m stuck with you for eternity? Let’s get you a room so I don’t have to watch this, please.” 

“Yeah, okay,” Sirius agreed, lacing his fingers together with Remus and allowing Regulus to direct them to a flight of stairs down a new hallway he hadn’t noticed before. “You’ll still be here in the morning, though, right?” He asked, staring at the back of his brother’s head, the end of a seven-year journey slowly leading him to his new existence. 

“Yeah, I’ll still be here in the morning.”

*

Out in the swirling snow a wolf nearly the size of a small horse sniffed the area near a smoldering fire. The last few embers were slowly dying, and the wolf ignored them in favor of snuffing around a few meters away where there were two men holding on to each other, half buried in the snow. Neither moved as the wolf nosed at their faces, and there was no breath coming from either of them. 

With a very human-seeming nod, the wolf dissipated into the snow, vanishing and taking the swirling flakes along with it, leaving two bodies huddled together in a warm misty rain. As the rain fell, it slowly washed away the dirt beneath them to reveal a skeletal hand, seven years dead.


End file.
